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BLONDE VENUS
***½
USA
Mother love mixed in with bits of nudity, adultery, prostitution and a musical
number titled "Hot Voodoo", where Dietrich emerges from a gorilla
costume. She plays a housewife who, in order to make money to help cure her
husband of a fatal illness, returns to her former career as a nightclub
entertainer.
Audiences initially rejected all this, since they preferred
Marlene in more exotic settings, and not necessarily as a New York hausfrau.
Audiences actually had a point since the contemporary New York setting lends
it a certain pretension of realism. This type of melodramatic nonsense really
belongs in the type of Hollywood studio recreation of a foreign land that
made the previous collaborations between this star and director work so well.
Not that this particular one doesn't have its moments: see "Hot
Voodoo", where Marlene Dietrich emerges from a gorilla costume.
dir: Josef von Sternberg
ph: Bert Glennon
cast: Marlene Dietrich, Herbert Marshall, Cary Grant, Dickie
Moore, Gene Morgan, Rita La Roy
BOUDU SAVED FROM
DROWNING
***½
USA
A self-righteous book dealer saves a bum from drowning and brings him into
his home.
One of those social satires where an impoverished, uncultured
outsider is called in to point out the hypocrisies of the upper middle class.
A lot of it works thanks to the mischievous, captivating naivety Simon brings
to Boudu, but it lacks the flow of Renoir's best work.
wr/dir: Jean Renoir
cast: Michel Simon, Charles Granval, Marcelle Hainia,
Séverine Lerczinska, , Jean Dasté, Jacques Becker
FANNY
*****
France
A direct continuation from "Marius" (1931) and itself followed by
"César" (1936), this is arguably the warm, witty and devastating
highlight of Marcel Pagnol's Fanny trilogy. The vibrant, lovable characters
already established in "Marius" continue to evolve with poignancy
and astute observation. The actors are uniformly delightful, particularly the
incomparable Raimu, a life force as César the temperamental bar owner.
dir: Marc Allégret
wr: Marcel Pagnol
cast: Raimu, Fernand Charpin, Orane Demazis, Pierre Fresnay,
Alida Rouffe, Auguste Mouriès, Robert Vattier, Milly Mathis
FORBIDDEN
***
USA
One of those early melodramas where a woman suffers for a married lover for
decades - and in this case, suffers hardcore: she bears a child, gives up
said child, kills a husband - there's more. Plausibility is a non-issue.
It's hard to say what, of all people, attracted Frank Capra to
this material, but he pushes the tearjerking at a breezy pace (it's among his
least sentimental films) and the leads are remarkably unaffected and
charming. Those who only know Ralph Bellamy as the sap in screwball comedies
are bound to be shocked at his behaviour here.
dir: Frank Capra
cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Adolphe Menjou, Ralph Bellamy, Dorothy
Peterson, Henry Armetta
FREAKS
****
GRAND HOTEL
****
HAPPINESS
***½
USSR
A hapless farmer seeks fortune.
An uncompromisingly black, frequently absurd and often very
funny Soviet comedy, if a little difficult to follow it times. Its savage
assault on the clergy would still grant it controversy today.
wr/dir: Aleksandr Medvedkin
cast: Nikolai Cherkasov, Mikhail Gipsi, Viktor Kulakov, Lidiya Nenasheva,
Yelena Yegorova, Pyotr Zinovyev
HORSE FEATHERS
****½
I AM A FUGITIVE
FROM A CHAIN GANG
****
USA
A hysterical and uncannily gripping exposé of the injustices of the
then-contemporary judicial and prison systems, with a down-and-out Paul Muni
inadvertently getting involved in a stick-up and sent to the chain gang. He
is mangled by demonic prison wardens until he escapes,
reforms and gets stuck in another kind of prison, with a shrill, nymphomaniac
harpy blackmailing him into marriage.
Although socially conscious, the sermonising gets heavy-handed
and more than a tad exploitative. But whatever compulsion or catharsis is
involved in watching a sympathetic, upstanding man's fortunes veer from worse
to agonising, this movie gets it. And it ends on a famously haunting note.
dir: Mervyn LeRoy
cast: Paul Muni, Glenda Farrell, Helen Vinson, Preston Foster, Allen
Jenkins, Edward Ellis, John Wray, Hale Hamilton, Harry Woods
KUHLE WAMPE
****
Germany
Although Brecht was involved in Pabst's 1931 adaptation of The Threepenny
Opera, he later renounced the film. He had much tighter control over this
agitprop exposé of Berlin working class life during the Depression, and he
therefore took greater pride in it. It's a superior film to Pabst's in any
case, borrowing some effective techniques from the Russians as well as
developing a sophisticated visual style of its own - the images are not only
starkly, eerily beautiful, they carry a newsreel immediacy that is evocative
of the period. The title refers to a camp for the dispossessed, where the
profoundly unfortunate family of the heroine ends up, countering their
squalor through communal drinking and a rabid fixation on tidiness. Even if
the call to revolution that drives the picture is unambiguously intended to
serve left-wing ideals, it's inevitable that its portrait of a
disenfranchised youth bent on political upheaval is viewed in the context of
the rising Nazism that put Hitler in power nine months after the premiere.
dir: Slatan Dudow
wr: Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Ottwald
ph: Günther Krampf
cast: Hertha Thiele, Ernst Busch, Martha Wolter, Adolf Fischer, Lili
Schoenborn-Anspach, Max Sablotzki, Alfred Schaefer
LOVE ME TONIGHT
*****
USA
A Parisian tailor falls in love with a princess and poses as a count.
This feathery, shimmery musical was enormously innovative for
its time: everyday street sounds gradually build into a chorus in its
captivating opening sequence; a song Chevalier stars humming in his store
carries the story from contemporary Paris to a secluded fairytale castle etc.
Maybe it's a 1930s thing, but Rouben Mamoulian and his army of
writers get away with a lot of things that in themselves are extraordinarily
silly, as when a horde of horses and huntsmen are projected in slow motion so
as not to disturb the sleeping deer. And there's also a nymphomaniac heiress,
a trio of hysterical old aunts and a plethora of quotable double entendres.
It's a delight - a silly, bawdy delight from beginning to end.
dir: Rouben Mamoulian
wr: Samuel Hoffenstein, Waldemar Young, George Marion Jnr
ph: Victor Milner
ad: Hans Dreier
cast: Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, C. Aubrey Smith, Charlie
Ruggles, Myrna Loy, Charles Butterworth, Elizabeth Patterson, Ethel
Griffies, Blanche Frederici
THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME
*****
THE MUMMY
***
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THE OLD DARK
HOUSE
*****
USA
Though not nearly as famous as James Whale's other comic horrors, this is
arguably the wittiest, most chilling and all around best. The set-up - young
travellers are forced by a storm to seek lodging in an isolated Gothic
mansion populated by weirdos - may not yet have been a cliché in 1932, but
Whale certainly treats it like one and peppers it with giddy, bizarre British
humour.
Visually, it's his most sophisticated film - his compositions
are more stylish and inventive than in either of his other classics - and
it's also the one most tightly crammed with oddballs: there's top-billed
Boris Karloff as a horrifically scarred, drunken, unstable butler, who
communicates in unintelligible grunts and wails; the piercing, fundamentalist
Eva Moore, who out-Una-O'Connors Una O'Connor; the ever-screwy Ernest
Thesiger as the effete, shifty host; an odd, tiny, twitchy and bizarrely
terrifying man named Brember Wills as the pyromaniac locked in the attic;
and, most unforgettably, a woman named Elspeth Dudgeon (credited as John
Dudgeon) as Sir Roderick Femm, the senile, bedridden, squeaky-voiced
102-year-old baronet, who makes funny noises all through the night. There's
also the old lady from Titanic in the shape of a young, delicate
starlet and the soon to be much more famous Melvyn Douglas and Charles
Laughton among the civilised guests.
It's beguiling to watch Whale send up the still-quite-young
horror conventions while at the same time exploiting them to ratchet up the
tension. It's hard to say how it works, but it does terrifically. The
climactic showdown is as absurd and outrageous as it is intense and
unnerving.
dir: James Whale
wr: Benn W. Levy, R.C. Sherriff
ph: Arthur Edeson
cast: Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton,
Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart, Lilian Bond, Ernest Thesiger, Eva Moore,
Brember Wills, Elspeth Dudgeon
ONE
HOUR WITH YOU
***½
USA
POIL DE CAROTTE
***½
USA
A young red-headed boy is neglected by his father and mistreated by his
mother.
A sensitive, affecting cross of rural drama and Cinderella,
sentimental in parts, but never in the saccharine Hollywood style. All of the
characterisations are in fact psychologically acute in a style that would
only become familiar to Hollywood decades later.
wr/dir: Julien Duvivier
cast: Robert Lynen, Harry Baur, Catherine Fonterey, Louis
Gouthier, Simone Aubry, Macime Fromiot, Colette Segall, Christiane Dor
QUE VIVA MEXICO
***
USA/Mexico
When Sergei Eisenstein went to Hollywood, he first
opted to direct this semi-documentary account of Mexican life - and death -
but never completed it. It has since been reconstructed in various versions,
of which the 1979 one is considered the most faithful to his aspirations. As
such, the film naturally holds a certain fascination for film scholars, but
its appeal is otherwise limited - as is its endurability, since the film
clearly wanted Eisenstein himself to edit it.
It was to have been his first sound film and he wrote the
voiceover narration for it, which, in this context, comes off as terribly
pretentious and never quite gels with the score.
The film was also to have been divided into a prologue, an
epilogue and four chapters, the fourth of which only survives in stills -
which is a particular shame since it looks like it would have been the most
interesting.
dir: Sergei Eisenstein
wr: Grigori Aleksandrov, Sergei Eisenstein
ph: Eduard Tisse
ed: Grigori Aleksandrov, Esfir Tobak
RED DUST
***½
USA
Brando did in Streetcar and maybe Paul Newman did in a couple of
things, but beyond that few men in Hollywood over the past century have oozed
sex so effortlessly and overpoweringly as Clarke Gable does in this otherwise
overwrought dinosaur about the sex life of a rubber plantation boss in
Indochina. If Clarke Gable isn't your kind of thing - and even if he is - you
also get to enjoy Jean Harlow taking a bubble bath in a barrel and saying
some rather naughty things. As a prim wife temporarily disoriented by carnal
impulses, Mary Astor gets in her way for a significant stretch and she's
lovely, as ever, but misplaced.
dir: Victor Fleming
cast: Clarke Gable, Jean Harlow, Mary Astor, Gene Raymond,
Donald Crisp, Tully Marshall, Forrester Harvey, Willie Fung
RED-HEADED WOMAN
****
USA
Before this scandalous comedy about a ruthless small-town social climber,
Jean Harlow was a blank face with hips and tits. It was as the titular
redhead that the archetypal platinum blonde first got to show off her natural
gift for tough, sassy screwball.
The picture is also notable for its pre-Code permissiveness
(Harlow ends up neither dead nor domesticated), and for a script which Anita
Loos reworked from a reportedly much soggier draft by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
dir: Jack Conway
wr: Anita Loos, F. Scott Fitzgerald
cast: Jean Harlow, Chester Morris, Lewis Stone, Leila
Hyams, Una Merkel, Henry Stephenson, Charles Boyer, May Robson, Harvey Clark
THE ROME EXPRESS
***
SCARFACE
****
SHANGHAI EXPRESS
****
USA
A notorious prostitute runs into an old flame on a train hijacked by Chinese
revolutionaries.
Efficient star vehicle. Dated, certainly, but superbly
photographed and still thoroughly entertaining.
dir: Josef von Sternberg
cast: Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook, Warner Oland, Anna May
Wong, Eugene Pallette, Lawerence Grant, Louise Closser Hale, Gustav von
Seyffertitz
TROUBLE IN
PARADISE
****½
USA
The romance between two international jewel thieves is threatened by the
attractions of their latest victim, a wealthy Parisian widow.
A mischievous, sophisticated romantic comedy, much-loved by
those who remember it. It drags in patches during its middle section - when
too much time is spent with the uncharismatic wealthy widow - but for the
most part sparkles with wit and imagination.
dir: Ernst Lubitsch
wr: Grover Jones, Samson Raphaelson
ph: Victor Milner
cast: Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis,
Charlie Ruggles, Edward Everett Horton, C. Aubrey Smith, Robert Grieg
VAMPYR
*****
Germany/France
A young traveller staying at a remote inn and witnesses unnatural events
throughout the night.
Dreyer belongs among the few filmmakers to realise the full
capacity of the horror genre, particularly the subtly unsettling impact that
suggestion can have over the viewer. In this, he was decades ahead of his
time - in some ways, it seems he remains decades ahead of our time.
The hazy, over-exposed look of the film hasn't aged well - or at
least the prints haven't - so that some of the imagery is difficult to decipher
today, but even then, it tends to contribute towards the film's evocative,
dream-like feel rather than detract from it.
dir: Carl Theodor Dreyer
wr: Christen Jul, Carl Theodor Dreyer
ph: Rudolph Maté, Louis Née
cast: Julian West, Maurice Schutz, Rena Mandel, Sybille Schmitz,
Jan Hieronimko, Henriette Gérard
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